This Atakapa Ishakkoy Living Dictionary is an electronic version of the Atakapa Ishākkoy Dictionary (2nd edition) by linguistic anthropologist David Kaufman, published by Exploration Press 2022 and created in close collaboration with Ishāk community members. Kaufman's dictionary was based on materials collected by Albert S. Gatschet and John R. Swanton in the early 20th century.
The linguistic data was imported to this online platform by David Kaufman in collaboration with researchers Anna Luisa Daigneault and Diego Córdova Nieto at Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages in 2024.
About the Ishāk
The (Atakapa) Ishāk are a North American Indigenous group, many of whom still inhabit their traditional homeland along the Gulf of Mexico in what is now southwestern Louisiana and eastern Texas. They have been in this region since before the European invasions of the sixteenth century. Ishāk history is closely intertwined with the history of the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV) and the history of Creole Louisiana. Zydeco is said to have developed out of traditional Ishāk musical tradition (Singleton 1996). The Ishāk language, also called Ishākkoy or Yukhíti Koy, described in this book, is a now dormant isolate language with no surviving linguistic relatives.
Modern Ishāk prefer to call themselves Atakapa Ishāk or simply Ishāk, meaning “person” or “people.” Ishāk also call themselves Yukhíti, a general term for “Indian” or Native person. The name Atakapa is an exonym bestowed upon them by Western Muskogean language speakers meaning ‘maneater,’ due to the supposed Ishakkoyan custom of ritual cannibalism, evidence of which is lacking and may actually refer to “the specter of enslavement by the Ishāk that other Indigenous Nations of the Gulf South feared” (Darensbourg and Price 2021, 14). Such labels as “cannibal” were sometimes also applied as a way of othering different groups of people, and the label was similarly applied to Karankawas and Tonkawas by other groups (Kimball 2022, 281).
The Ishakkoyans were divided into four or five main bands. Those speaking Hiyékiti (Eastern Atakapa) were on Vermilion Bayou and the Mermentau River, while those speaking Yukhíti and Orkokisak (Akokisa) were on the Calcasieu, Sabine, Neches, and Trinity Rivers (1932:2). Swanton estimated a population of between 1000-3500 ca. 1805 (Swanton 1946, 94). The Ishāk may have been in place along the Gulf coast for a very long time, perhaps millennia (Kaufman 2019, 36).
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
A work like this is not the work of just one person. I want to express my deepest gratitude to the Ishāk consultants Kishyuc (Louison Huntington), Tottoksh (Delilah [Delia] Moss), Teet Verdine, and Armojean Reon for sharing their language with the early linguists Albert Gatschet and John Swanton. I also want to thank Hugh Singleton, who laid the foundation of Ishākkoy language revitalization in the 1990s. I would also like to thank the Ishāk community members and my friends Chief Edward Chretien, Jeffery Darensbourg, Tanner Menard, Russell Reed, and Çaca Yvaire for their support of this project and without whose help and contributions this dictionary could not have been done. I owe a debt of gratitute to my linguist colleague and friend Geoffrey Kimball; without his data analysis of Gatschet’s original handwritten notes this second edition could not have been possible. I also offer my sincere gratitude to my friend and colleague Justin Southworth for his insight and support in the preparation of this dictionary. I also want to thank my friend and colleague Stephen Compton, head of Exploration Press, for his editing expertise, cover design, and support in getting this book published.
-Dave Kaufman (2022)